Summer Lies (7 page)

He stood up and went to the pond. It began to rain; he heard the first drops splashing gently into the water and saw the surface ripple before he felt them. Then suddenly he was wet. The rain rustled in the plane trees and on the gravel, pouring as if to wash away everything that didn’t deserve to exist.

He would have liked to stand in the rain with Anne, put his arms around her from behind and feel her body under her wet clothes. Where was she? Was she outdoors too? Was she enjoying the rain the way he was, and did she understand that their stupid quarrel should just be washed away by it? Or had she ordered a taxi and was packing her clothes in the hotel?

No, when he came in, her clothes were still there. She wasn’t. He took off his wet clothes and lay down. He wanted to stay awake, wait for her, talk to her. But the rain was pattering outside and the day had made him tired and the fight had left him exhausted, and he fell asleep. Sometime in the middle of the night he woke up. Anne was lying beside him. She was on her back, arms crossed behind her head, eyes wide open. He propped himself up and looked at her face. She didn’t look at him. He lay down on his back too.

“The feeling that I can’t contradict a woman, that I’m not allowed to refuse her anything, that I have to be alert and anticipate what she wants and flirt with her—I think it’s all to do with my mother. I feel it all the time, and I behave that way automatically, whether I’m attracted to the woman or not, or whether I want anything from her or not. As a result I create expectations that I can’t fulfill; for a time I try to fulfill them anyway, then it becomes too much for me and I sneak away,
or the woman has enough and retreats. It’s a fool’s game, and I ought to learn to leave it alone. Should I talk to a therapist about me and my mother? Whatever—the game reaches its limit before it leads to sex, it doesn’t even lead to preliminaries. Maybe I put an arm around the woman or squeeze her hand, but that’s all. Maybe the limits have something to do with my mother too. I don’t want to owe the woman anything, and if I slept with her, I’d owe her something. In my whole life I’ve only slept with women I loved or had at least fallen in love with. I don’t love Therese, nor am I in love with her. It could be lovely with her, light somehow, undemanding, relaxed, in a way that things almost never are with us. But I’ve never asked myself if it was a possibility or if I wanted to leave you and live with her.

“That’s one thing I wanted to say to you. The other is that …”

She interrupted him. “What did the two of you do the next day?”

“We went to the art museum in Baden-Baden, and a winery and the castle in Heidelberg.”

“Why did you call her from here?”

“What gives you …” He realized that he’d started to say the same thing when she’d asked him about the trip with Therese, and that he was being interrupted the same way.

“I saw it on your phone. You called her three days ago.”

“She had a biopsy because there was a suspicion of breast cancer, and I asked her how it went.”

“Her breasts …” She said it as if she were shaking her head. “Does she know you’re here with me? Does she have any idea we’re together? For seven years now? What does she know about me?”

He hadn’t concealed Anne from Therese, but he’d left things vague. When he went to see her, he was going to Amsterdam
or London or Toronto or Wellington to write. He mentioned seeing Anne there, and didn’t rule out the possibility that he was living with her there, but he also didn’t make it clear. He didn’t tell Therese about the difficulties he had with Anne, and told himself that that would be a betrayal. But he didn’t ever talk about his happiness with Anne either. He told Therese that although he liked her a lot, he didn’t love her, but he didn’t tell her he loved Anne. On the other hand he hadn’t kept Therese’s existence from Anne either. Though he also hadn’t told her how often they saw each other.

It wasn’t right and he knew it, and sometimes felt like a bigamist with one family in Hamburg and the other in Munich. Like a bigamist? That was too severe. He wasn’t presenting anyone with a false picture. He was presenting sketches rather than pictures, and sketches aren’t false, because that’s all they are—sketches. Luckily he’d told Therese that Anne was going to be in Provence too. “She knows we’ve been together for years and we’re together here. What else she knows—I don’t talk about you much to friends and acquaintances.”

Anne didn’t respond. He didn’t know if this was a good sign or a bad one, but after a time his tension eased. He realized how tired he was. He struggled to stay awake and to hear whatever Anne might say. His eyes closed, and at first he thought he could manage to be awake even with his eyes closed, but then he realized he was falling asleep, or rather, no, that he’d already nodded off and then woken up again. What had woken him? Had Anne said something? He propped himself up again; she was lying beside him with her eyes open, but still didn’t look at him. The moon was no longer shining into the room.

Then she spoke. There was the gray light of dawn outside, so he must have gone to sleep. “I don’t know if I can get over what happened. But I know I won’t be able to get over it if you
keep trying to fool me that it was all nothing. It looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, and you want me to believe it’s a swan? I’m sick of your lies, I’m sick of them, sick of them. If I’m going to stay with you, then it’s got to be the truth.” She pushed back the covers and got up. “I think it’s best if we don’t see each other again till tonight. I’d like to have the room and Cucuron to myself. Take the car and go someplace.”

While she was in the bathroom, he got dressed and left. The air was still cool, the streets still empty, not even the baker or the café were open yet. He got into the car and drove.

He went to the mountains of Luberon and when the road forked or came to a crossroads, he simply took whichever one promised to lead higher into the mountains. When it had nowhere further to climb, he parked the car and followed the well-worn, overgrown wheel ruts along the ridge and down the far slope.

Why didn’t he just say he’d slept with Therese? What was it in him that fought so hard against this? That it wasn’t true? He had had no trouble lying otherwise, when it was to avoid conflict. Why was he finding it so hard now? Because otherwise he was making the world only a little more pleasant whereas now he would be making himself look worse than he was?

He suddenly remembered how his mother, when he was a little boy and had done something he shouldn’t, would give him no peace until he confessed the bad desires that had driven him to the bad deeds. Later he read about the ritual of criticism and self-criticism in the Communist Party, in which anyone who’d deviated from the party line was hammered at until he repented of his bourgeois tendencies—it was what his mother
had done with him and what Anne was doing with him now. Had he sought his mother in Anne and found her again?

So, no false confessions. Break it off with Anne. Didn’t they fight far too much? Wasn’t he sick of her screaming at him? Sick of her spying into his laptop and his telephone and his desk and his cupboard? Sick of her expecting that when she needed him, he’d have to be there for her? Wasn’t Anne’s intensity too much for him? Lovely as it was to sleep with her—did it have to be so weighted with feeling and meaning? Mightn’t it be lighter, more playful, more physical with someone else? And the traveling—at first there had been a certain charm to spending three or four weeks in the spring at some college in the American West and the fall at a university on the Australian coast, and in between several months in Amsterdam, but now it was actually a chore. The rolls with fresh herring you could buy from street stalls in Amsterdam were delicious. But beyond that?

He passed the foundations of a stable or a barn and sat down. How high in the mountains he was! In front of him a slope covered in olive trees tilted downward toward a flat valley, behind it were low mountains, and behind those was the plain with its little towns, one of which was Cucuron. On clear days could one see the sea from here? He heard the chirping of cicadas and the bleating of sheep, though he was unable to spot them when he looked. The sun rose higher in the sky, warming his body and releasing the scent of the rosemary.

Anne. Whatever it was that was wrong with her—when they made love in the afternoon, first in the bright daylight and then again as dusk fell, they couldn’t get enough of looking at each other and touching each other, and when they lay side by side, exhausted and satisfied, talking came quite naturally. And how he loved to watch her swim, in a lake or in the sea, compact and strong and as supple as a sea otter. How he loved to watch her playing with children and dogs, oblivious of herself
and the world, given over to the moment. How happy he was when she focused on a thought he’d had and lightly but surely touched on the point where he’d got carried away. How proud he was when they were together with his friends or hers and she dazzled with her mind and her wit. How safe he felt when they were holding each other.

He was reminded of a report about German, Japanese, and Italian soldiers in Russian prisoner-of-war camps. The Russians tried to indoctrinate their captives and also induct them into the ritual of criticism and self-criticism. The Germans, accustomed to leadership and robbed of it, went along with the ritual; the Japanese preferred to be killed rather than collaborate with the enemy. The Italians played along, but didn’t take the proceedings seriously, cheering and clapping as if they were at the opera. Should he too play along with Anne’s criticism and self-criticism session, without taking it seriously? With laughter in his heart, should he admit whatever she wanted to have admitted?

But admitting it wouldn’t be the end of things. She would want to know how it could have come to that. She wouldn’t rest until she’d found out what was wrong with him. Until he’d seen it too. And the insights thus won would be put to use again and again as explanations and accusations.

Only now did he notice how far he’d walked and how long he’d been sitting on the wall. On the way back he kept expecting at every bend of the path to find the road beyond and his car standing there, but there would be another bend and then yet another. When he finally did reach the car and looked at his watch, he saw it was noon and he was hungry.

He drove further into the mountains and found a restaurant in the next village with tables out on the street and a view of the church and the town hall. There were sandwiches, and he ordered one with ham and one with cheese and wine and water and a café au lait. The waitress was young and pretty and took her time; she calmly enjoyed his admiration and explained what kind of ham she could fetch from the butcher around the corner and what kind of cheese she had. First she brought the wine and the water, and before the sandwiches reached him he was already a little drunk.

He remained the only guest. When the carafe of wine was empty, he asked if there might be a bottle of champagne somewhere in the cellar. She laughed, gave him a pleased and conspiratorial look, and when she bent forward to clear the plates from the table, the neckline of her blouse revealed the top of her breasts. He looked after her and called, “Bring two glasses!”

She laughed. Pleased that he stood up and pulled the chair out for her. Pleased that he popped the champagne cork with a bang. Pleased that he clinked glasses with her. Pleased that he asked such careful questions about what life as an attractive woman was like in a godforsaken mountain village. In the summer she helped her grandmother in the restaurant. Otherwise she studied photography in Marseille, traveled a lot, had lived in America and Japan and published already. Her name was Renée.

“I close up between three and five.”

“Do you take a midday nap?”

“It would be the first time.”

“What could be nicer at midday than …”

“I know what could be nicer.” She laughed.

She looked at the time. “Today I’m closing the restaurant at two thirty already.”

“Good.”

They stood up and took the champagne with them. He followed her through the dining room and the kitchen. His head was swimming from the champagne and the prospect of sex, and as Renée climbed the dark staircase in front of him, he could have ripped the clothes from her body right then and there—but he had the bottle and the glasses in his hands. At that moment Anne and her quarrel went through his head—wasn’t there a principle that if one is condemned for an act one has not in fact committed, one cannot then be punished as and when one actually commits it? Double jeopardy? Anne had punished him for something he hadn’t done. So now he was allowed to do it.

Renée laughed a lot in bed too. She laughed as she took out the bloody tampon and set it on the floor next to the bed. She made love as functionally and skillfully as if she were playing a sport. Only after they were both exhausted did she become tender and wanted to kiss him and be kissed by him. The second time she held him tighter than she had the first, but afterward she soon checked the time and sent him away. It was four thirty. Her grandmother would be back soon. And he wasn’t to come back; in three days her time in, what had he called it, her godforsaken village in the mountains, would be over.

She accompanied him to the staircase. From downstairs he looked up one more time: she was leaning against the banisters, and in the darkness he couldn’t read the expression on her face.

“It was lovely with you.”

“Yes.”

“I like your laugh.”

“Get going.”

He would have liked a summer storm, but the sky was blue and the heat hung in the narrow street. As he got into the car he saw a Mercedes pull up outside the restaurant and an old couple get out. Renée came through the door, greeted them both, and helped them carry groceries into the house.

He drove slowly in order to keep Renée in his rearview mirror for a little. He was suddenly overwhelmed with a powerful longing for another life, a life with winter in the city by the sea and summer in the village in the mountains, a life with its own unchanging, reliable rhythm, in which one always drove the same routes, slept in the same bed, met the same people.